What has your attention in the week ahead?

What do you want more of? And perhaps, what do you want less of?

From a simple gardening perspective...

If you have a potted plant soaking up the summer sunshine, what could you do this week to make it even more beautiful? Deadhead a few spent blooms. Trim away leaves that are no longer serving the plant. Perhaps replace a plant that has finished blooming with one that's just beginning its season.

What has your attention in the week ahead?

What do you want more of? And perhaps, what do you want less of?

From a simple gardening perspective...

If you have a potted plant soaking up the summer sunshine, what could you do this week to make it even more beautiful? Deadhead a few spent blooms. Trim away leaves that are no longer serving the plant. Perhaps replace a plant that has finished blooming with one that's just beginning its season.

This week Ed and I are celebrating our 40th wedding anniversary, just the two of us on a little Colorado adventure. Yes, on August 28, 1986 in a sweet little park in the foothills of Boulder we vowed to love each other through all the challenges of life.

Well, my friend I indeed have been out wandering around looking at the world through different lenses so to speak.

This morning as my fingers find their way back to my computer keyboard, I am full of “wanderment” so to speak.

What really touched me in meeting Tina and Cass, and our subsequent interview and garden tour, was their story. How as two busy moms they found each other during the isolating time of the pandemic through Instagram.  They connected because of the passion they had both discovered during that time in creating their own new gardens.

Coming together they decided to share the spirit of gardening with their local community in the form of a seed swap to help make gardening more affordable.

We might be planting the same thing over and over in the work we do, in the love we share, in thoughts we think. And frankly, when we do that the repetitiveness of the same old same old can get boring and try us right down to our bones.

This Monday morning has me feeling extremely grateful to my hands and all the work I put them through over this past weekend. Thought I would share a few words I wrote this week for my book about the power and gratitude for our hands.

After a pretty insane spring storm on Wednesday, I had to work like crazy to get all my seedlings in the garden this weekend so I could get on a plane this morning.

In addition to my tribute towards our hands I am also sharing the video of a lovely tour I did a few weeks ago with Kaitlin Mitchell of Rutabaga Gardening.

Patience no doubt is something that comes with time and experience, giving us hope. Tish Harrison Warren shares in her book, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life, “The singular mark of patience is not endurance or fortitude but hope. To be impatient…is to live without hope.”

I didn’t do it. It was the plants that did it.  – Kate Sessions

During my adventures here in San Diego not only have I been loving the Jacaranda trees that are blooming everywhere, but I also had the opportunity to visit Balboa Park and learn more about the woman who brought Jacarandas and so many other trees here.

Kate Sessions was a true legend to the horticultural scene here in San Diego. I decided to do some digging and share more about her truly amazing story and tour the park in today’s video.

We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one.

– Jacques Cousteau

Here is a little trivia…Did you know that the first Earth Day back in 1970 came to be partly because of a massive oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California in January of 1969? Sadly, millions of gallons of oil were released into the Santa Barbara channel, devastating the area.